Insanity and Intertextuality

New Brontë-related papers:

No Rest for the Wicked: Immoral Implications of Insanity and Sleeplessness in Jane Eyre
Karen Beth Strovas
CEA Critic, Volume 78, Number 3, November 2016  pp. 384-392

Mr. Edward Rochester of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre chooses not to institutionalize his wife, who has been deemed “mad” by “medical men”. Instead, he conceals Bertha Mason Rochester in a third story attic of Thornfield Hall to “shelter her degradation” of mental illness “with secrecy”. Brontë writes only a handful of scenes in Jane Eyre relating directly to Bertha and her insanity, and most but not all of them are set at night. While others lie in bed, Bertha escapes her attic and prowls the hallways, laughing with a “low, slow ha! ha!” or projecting “eccentric murmurs,” scratching at doors, “snarling, snatching . . . almost like a dog”. She quarrels with and even attempts to murder those who have confined her or are complicit in her confinement, namely Rochester and her brother Richard Mason. She also haunts Jane who attempts, albeit unknowingly, to displace her as Mrs. Rochester.

Intertextuality, narrators and other voices in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea
Rosalia Angelita Neumann Garcia, Mariana Lessa de Oliveira
Letras, Santa Maria, v. 26, n. 53, p. 215-235, jul./dez. 2016

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is often perceived as a postcolonial response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Although the two novels present intertextual relations, Rhys’ narrative structure both distances itself from Brontë’s narrative as well as complements it. It is the objective of this article to study the level of intertextuality Wide Sargasso Sea presents in relation to its 19th century counterpart as well as carry out an analysis on the types of narrators and focalization noticeable in the three separate units of the novel through the theories of homodiegetic narrators presented by Bal and Nieragden